Stainless Steel

Exactly, yeah. That was a hard lesson for me. The story behind that is that, after we finished Carmageddon 2, SCI said to us - literally the day after - 'right, off we go then, Carmageddon 3' and we went 'woah, hang on a minute, we've been doing nothing but Carma for three years, give us a break a minute and a chance to work on something else' so they went off and brought someone else in. They treated that as us turning down the option. Obviously if we'd known that they were going to get someone else, then we'd have done it, but the first thing we knew about Carmageddon: TDR 3000 was a press release on CTW. That was a nice morning [laughs].

Yeah, and I've got no complaints about that to be honest, because that was just the way the industry works and it was their money. I can look at this both ways - from an artistic standpoint it's crap, and it's not how things work in for instance the book publishing market, but that's because a book's cheap to produce. It is how things work in the film industry, as I said, because films are not cheap, and even though Carmageddon back then in 1995 was only a matter of hundreds of thousands [of pounds], not millions, it was still hundreds of thousands of someone else's money and we at the time were an unknown startup. It's just the way things work. If you remember, the only reason that Valve own Half-Life is they held a gun to Sierra's head and said we won't do it unless you give us the rights back. That was a nice bit of brinksmanship!

The only reason that Valve own Half-Life is they held a gun to Sierra's head and said we won't do it unless you give us the rights back.

Well, it should be avoided if you can, but good luck with trying to. There are people we're talking to at the moment, in terms of getting Carmageddon funded, who are saying 'no, no, we don't want to take your IP from you anymore' - actually getting that into reality is a different matter. You've got to look at it from their standpoint as well; with my businessman hat on I can see their viewpoint. They're putting a lot of money into this, they're going to market it - what they're doing is building up somebody else's brand. So I think the only way you can get a deal like that at the moment is by offering a lot of sequels and derivative rights and whatever, because otherwise why should they do it? That's why hopefully what will come into the market more, and it hasn't yet, is project finance. So you'll get a pure financial arrangement. There's lots of people trying to do this, and we're talking to most of 'em. So if you can get the money in from that direction, then the IP is a moot point. They don't want the IP. They want to make a higher percentage return than they will by sticking their money in the bank.

Actual game funds. They don't really exist yet, not in a working form. Whenever it's a publisher, they'll want the brand themselves, whereas it's an investment fund they're not interested in that. I've been in the business for a long time now, and I've been hearing for decades about these sorts of funds getting set up, but at the moment they don't really exist. There are a few funds out there and we're talking to most of them, but it's tough, really tough, to actually get that money out of people. Whereas a publisher, it's worth their while investing that money if they're building something. Unless they're building something, rather than just getting those first returns, it's very difficult to justify investing in that game. Because say you've got two games on the table, from a publisher's perspective, and one of them you keep the IP and the other you don't, which are you going to go for? It's damned tough for someone coming in here.

We're in a fortunate position at the moment, because due to various circumstances, with Square buying Eidos which SCI reversed into, so the Carmageddon IP therefore being up for sale which itself is unusual, at just the time where we're earning good money from the magic thing, I think was a very fortunate set of circumstances. Although it was a lot of hard work, it enables us now to be in a position where we're an independent developer and we own a valuable brand.

Absolutely not... although, you should never say never. If someone came up and offered us half a billion...[laughs] So no, not unless it was silly money. It's great having that brand again, it's come back home. Since setting the website up and the Facebook page and everything, people are loving the fact it's come back to us. We've had emails, on average probably once a week since forever, asking when's the next Carmageddon coming out.

Very long term, yeah. We didn't expect to own it at first, but we did hope to work on it again. We were actually working a little bit with SCI - they commissioned us a few years ago, before they bought Eidos, to start looking into Carmageddon and the value of Carmageddon. They realised that Carmageddon was us - without Stainless it's nothing. So they did actually pay us to start boiling down what the brand was, so we were expecting to work on it again. Then they bought Eidos, and they had bigger fish to fry when that happened, because of course they were just crazily busy suddenly inheriting all these brands. So then nothing was really happening with it, because they weren't going to sell it, but also they weren't going to work on it when they didn't have the bandwidth because they suddenly had Hitman, Tomb Raider, Championship Manager... So it was suddenly dead. We had been trying to do this for six or seven years now; only when Square bought then, and then of course we immediately contacted them to see if they were interested in selling it, and we were very surprised when they came back and said 'yes.' Very surprised, actually. Even then, it's taken a couple of years - since Square first bought them.

Yeah, it's taken a long time, lot of lawyers involved. We weren't the only ones bidding either - there were two other bidders.

I do. I can't say, but they were trying for it. It was a genuine sale.

I know, yeah. [Laughs]. Too right. It would have been even worse. Fortunately, it happened at a time where we did have cash in the bank.